We search, perpetually, for technological solutions to our problems. We apply the spell-check techno-sword to the Gordian knot of writing, hoping that will save us.
It will not -- at least, not always.
I can say that because I have read many books and written thousands of words over the long years and am, at this late stage in the word game, a professor.
I could (but, of course, will not) just slap people who lean on spell check.
One thing I will give the 3rd-grade teacher at Our Lady of Lourdes Elementary in Altoona, Pa., in 1957-ish. She had a deep sense of the value of public humiliation.
"Mr. Madigan would like everyone in the class to know how drave he is," she said while returning one of my less-than-perfect tiny essays with a public comment while I was at her desk.
"Isn't he the drave little boy now? Don't you think he is drave?"
That was the point at which I absorbed that the small "b" went right and the small "d" went left. You don't forget education like that, which, along with much of elementary parochial school learning of the 1950s, created knowledge from an amalgam of information and humiliation.
But because these classroom humiliations don't happen anymore, many students of the modern era turn to spell-checking as a substitute for that cranky, effective wisdom, which is a sad mistake.
Two things we simply had to learn in elementary school in the 1950s were spelling and sentence structure, the latter a discipline reinforced by seemingly endless diagraming of sentences.
No matter how well constructed, common computer programs are not sophisticated enough to understand written English.
Take this sentence:
"Eye was not surprised to find that there was no their there and that my shoes were not gnu."
It is not likely that you would ever need to write a sentence like that -- unless, of course, you actually have shoes made of gnu (which isn't very common) and spend a lot of time writing about pronouns and adverbs.
But assume you did need to write a sentence like that. How would spell-checker perform?
Well, if you set spell-checker to work on this article, we would be in trouble long before the sentence in question. Spell-checker would be stopped dead by the word "drave."
It would try to help by offering these alternatives: "Drive, drove, drapes, drake, rove, driven, drive, drives, drivel."
I know why it does this. The algorithm that runs the effort looks for similar things but never assumes maybe you wanted to be brave about using "drave" in a story.
On to the gnu example.
What a surprise! Spell-checker finds no objections in the use of "eye" instead of "I," can't make distinctions between "their" and "there," and does not notice that the "gnu" belongs not in a shoe but in a zoo, because it's a zoo gnu and not a shoe new.
You might think none of this is important.
Being graded in college is a lot like being graded in life. You get to make a few mistakes, and then you hit that point at which it is clear you have gone one assumption too far. In college, that tolerant professor (or in life, that wife, mate, friend, God, whatever) reaches a limit.
Then bad things happen. Cascades of bad things happen, in fact.
Different places have different standards, of course.
Over four decades in journalism, I came to value editors of all kinds, but copy editors most of all. No matter how hot we think we might be in the world of purposeful typing, writing is full of peril that commands the protection of trained, smart eyes.
An editor, if you will.
They save us from our sloppiness and protect us against homonyms.
"To shoot the boar, he used a large-bore weapon, then talked endlessly of his triumph, which, in the view of bolder hunters, classified him as a bore." It's not the kind of thing spell-checker can review with much success.
"To shoot the bore, he used a large-boar weapon, then talked endlessly of his triumph, which in the view of bolder hunters, classified him as a boar."
That's just peachy with my spell-checker program.
In fact, problems with homonyms are key indicators in a college paper that a student is hobbling along on a spell-check crutch.
When I read them, I wonder what was happening at that particular point in someone's life that led them to turn to spell checking instead of knowing that "there" and "their" are different words, or that nouns and verbs must agree.
I know it's a traditionalist view, but spell checking just isn't the same as knowing how to use the language. We fool ourselves when we think it is.
So let this be a tribute to my 3rd-grade teacher, who was either Mrs. McDonald or Mrs. MacDonald. I cannot recall. And spell-checker is no help there at all.
Charles M. Madigan, a former editor of Perspective, is presidential writer in residence at Roosevelt University.